My friend MelHerb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. Mel
McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.¶ The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were MelHerb and meI and his second wife, Teresa – Terri, we called her – and my wife, Laura.
We lived in Albuquerque,then.Butbut we were all
from somewhere else. ¶ There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. MelHerb thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He saidWhen he was
young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. HeHe’d left the Church at the same time,
but he said he still looked back onto those years in the seminary as the most important in his life.

Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with MelHerb loved her so much he tried to kill her. Herb laughed after she said this. He made a face. Terri looked at him. Then Terrishe
said, “He beat me up one night, the last night we lived together. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept
saying,, all the while saying, ‘I love you, don’t you see? I love you, you
bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room. My, my head kept knocking on things.”
TerriShe looked around the table at us and then looked at her hands on her glass. “What do
you do with love like that?” she said.¶ She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung
down her back. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings. She was fifteen years younger than Herb, had suffered periods of
anorexia, and during the late sixties, before she’d gone to nursing school, had been a dropout, a “street person” as she put it. Herb sometimes called her, affectionately, his hippie.

“Say what you want to, but I know it washe loved me,” Terri said. “I know he
did. It may sound crazy to you, but it’s true just the same. People are different, MelHerb. Sure, sometimes he may
have acted crazy. Okay. But he loved me. In his own way, maybe, but he loved me. There waswas love there, MelHerb. Don’t say there wasn’tdeny me that.”

MelHerb let out his breath. He held his glass and turned to Laura and me. “The manHe threatened to kill me,metoo.” Mel said. He
finished his drink and reached for the gin bottle. “Terri’s a romantic. Terri’s of the ‘Kick-me-so-I’ll-know-you-love-me’ school. Terri, hon, don’t look that way.” MelHe reached across the table and touched Terri’sher cheek with his fingers. He grinned
at her.

“Now he wants to make up,” Terri said. “After he tries to dump on me.” She wasn’t smiling.

“Make up what?” MelHerb said. “What is there to make up? I know what I know. That’s, and that’s all.”

“What would you call it then?” Terri said. “How’d we get started on this subject anyway?” Terri said. She raised her glass and
drank from it. “Herb always has love on his mind,” she said. “Don’t you, honey?” She smiled now, and I thought that was the
last of it.

“I just wouldn’t call EdCarl’s behavior love. That’s,
that’s all I’m saying, honey,” MelHerb said. “What about you guys?” Melhe said to Laura and me. “Does that sound like love to you?”

I shrugged. “I’m the wrong person to ask.,” I said.“I didn’t even know the man. I’ve only heard his name mentioned in passing. Carl. I wouldn’t know. You’d have to know all the
particulars. Not in my book it isn’t, but who’s to say? There’re lots of different ways of behaving and showing affection. That way doesn’t happen to
be mine. But I think what you’re saying, Herb, is that love is an absolute.?”